I just became aware of Rogue Legacy today, via RockLeeSmile’s YouTube channel, and I’m already a giddy-child-hype-machine over this game. As Nick puts it in his preview of the game, it’s like a mix of 10,000,000 and a “Metroid-vania” platformer RPG (as he refers to the in-development game, Chasm). That’s all I’ll say, as I haven’t played it myself, but do yourself a favor and watch the video posted above.

A friendly comment on a random news post I made in 2010 may have just inspired me to ressurrect this blog from the dead. It has already spurred me to try and be more active in WoW (and get a class I actually enjoy to level 90), install DC Universe Online, and has me looking into Lord of the Rings Online’s latest incoming patch that’s dropping May 15th.

I may not be ready to commit to my old ways of only playing MMOs, but I’m curious to see if I can get back on the MMO-train while still avoiding the burnout that comes when you don’t just commit yourself to the idea of playing a singular MMO for the immediate future. I’m really wanting to get back into WoW, but I’m not going to rule out dabbling in other MMOs along the way.

So in the meantime, here’s a pretty cool Shadow Priest PVP video that I stumbled upon that helped convince me to transfer my level 49 Gnome Priest to my current server and attempt to make him my new main.

I’ve had my eyes on Trion World‘sRift: Planes of Telara since it was first unveiled a year ago at E3 as Heroes of Telara. Many shrugged it off as another cookie-cutter “WoW clone,” but I saw some promise in it. Now, a year later, the more I read and see about it, the more I think Rift could really end up being a phenomenal game. The combination of the dynamic world events and robust class(souls) mixing system seem really interesting. The amount of polish the game looks to have, when it’s only in an internal alpha stage, gives me very high hopes and honestly has me impressed by Trion and their first MMO development project.

As you’ve probably heard by now, the Final Fantasy XIV Open Beta was abruptly delayed, just hours before it was supposed to go live. The official statement, as well as the follow-up statement are seen below.

FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test Postponed

FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test, which is scheduled to begin at 19:00 (PDT) on Aug. 31, 2010, will be postponed due to a confirmation of critical bugs. New schedule will be releaseｄ at a later date.

Along with the postponement of FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test, the issuing of registration code for FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test will be postponed as well. With the download of client software’s installer, it will be suspended at 19:00 (PDT) on Aug. 31, 2010.

Listening to the latest MMOvoices podcast and their discussion of EverQuest Extended (and its horrible implementation of the ‘free2play’ model) reminded me that EverQuest 2 already has a cash-shop within the regular, $15/month subscription, retail boxed-product. This made me think of Cryptic, who I consider to be the most dirty and unapologetic violators of this heinous act. You could go out on a limb and even say Blizzard does this as well, with their $10 vanity pets, $25 mounts, and handful of account services – but none of that is accessible in-game and most importantly none of that is intrusive and blatantly being commercialized to you while in game. When I think “cash-shop” in an MMO, I think of a big button on the in-game UI that is begging you to click it (read: EQ2 and Cryptic’s games).

I could probably name-drop a few more “subscription & cash-shop” games, but let’s stick to EQ2 and Champions Online (and breifly Star Trek Online). These are the ones that I have personally experienced and felt that the cash-shop was an impediment in my enjoyment of the game and left a very bad taste in my mouth.